China's Chou
Rickett, W. Allyn
China's Chou Chou En-lai: China's Gray Eminence, by Kai-yu Hsu. Doubleday. 294 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by W. Allyn Rickett Few books on Communist China could be more timely than this biography of...
...He has attempted to give this biography a personal and intimate character by such devices as recreating conversations from the reminiscences of his various informants...
...But at the same time this very attractiveness as a personality and ability to communicate with non-Communists has often rendered him even more of an enigma to Westerners...
...For as Kai-yu Hsu, professor of humanities and foreign languages and director of area studies at San Francisco State College, points out, of the handful of men who launched the Chinese Communist movement in the early 1920's, only Chou En-lai has remained at the forefront from the beginning until today...
...Somehow it is difficult for many people to grasp that a person so easy to talk to can also be so diametrically opposed to everything they stand for...
...Hsu gives Huai-an, Kiangsu...
...Long before Mao Tse-tung emerged as leader of the Chinese Communists, Chou had built the Party elite...
...In attempting a biography of Chou En-lai, Professor Hsu has undertaken a task loaded with difficulties...
...This is unfortunate because in general the book shows a tremendous research effort and that admirable balance of sympathy and objectivity which marked Professor Hsu's earlier work, Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry...
...One can then imagine the difficulties of trying to document Chou's role during the 1926-27 revolution when he was not only one of the top two or three men in the Communist Party but also the political head of Chiang Kai-shek's armed forces and the chief administrator of the largest area under Nationalist control...
...Chou who has been the chief architect of Peking's foreign policy...
...Chou who commanded the Red troop movement during the 1934-36 Long March...
...Mao's current heir-apparent, Defense Minister Lin Piao, was Chou's protege...
...So much of Chou's life has been spent in the super-secret atmosphere of revolution that there is little available from the public record except a few Party documents on policy and sporadic interviews with the press...
...Part of Professor Hsu's problem stems from his approach...
...No doubt his greatest hour of triumph abroad came at the Bandung Conference in April, 1955, where his personal charm and conciliatory attitude stole the show...
...But the gaps in this type of material are too extensive, and the controversial nature of many situations too great, to permit this approach to be carried out effectively...
...No man in the Chinese leadership is better known outside China...
...And today it is Chou to whom the Party is turning to save it once again from collapse...
...At no time has he wavered in terms of Communist goals nor shown any hesitation in the brutal crushing of opposition if he felt that this was what was needed...
...There is no official biography, since the policy of the Chinese Communists has been to de-emphasize the personal life of all its leaders, including Mao...
...If he- has been moderate as a revolutionary it is simply that as a superb administrator he has seen the need to keep destructive divisiveness to a minimum and prepare carefully for each new change in policy...
...Handsome," "witty," "debonair," "friendly," "reasonable," "non-doctrinaire"—all are adjectives the Western press has applied to him...
...Chou's years as a student in France during the early 1920's, residence in Chungking as the Communist representative there during the war against Japan as well as his many contacts with foreigners both inside China and on his many travels abroad since 1949, have gained for him an extremely attractive image...
...It was Chou who directed the 1927 Nanchang revolt that marked the formal beginning of the Chinese Red Army...
...Other sources give I-wu in Chekiang, and Hunan...
...During the past two years it has often seemed that only Chou's reasonable permissiveness has stood between China and chaos...
...Thus, even though Professor Hsu attempts to deal somewhat with these questions in footnotes, the result is frequently incredulity on the part of the reader...
...Only last July he undertook another of his many dangerous troubleshooting missions, flying to Wuhan to calm a mounting revolt by dissident army commanders...
...Again and again, "Peking watchers" over the years have attempted to label Chou as basically pro-Western and anti-Russian, or as a "moderate" in terms of the revolution, only to find themselves disappointed...
...It was Chou who conciliated Chiang Kai-shek when the Communists were too weak to oppose him...
...Or that a Chinese need be neither pro-Western nor pro-Russian but simply pro-Chinese...
...In this respect Professor Hsu has rendered a valuable service, for he shows Chou as a man completely devoted to his country and the belief that the Chinese Communist Party is its only salvation...
...Reviewed by W. Allyn Rickett Few books on Communist China could be more timely than this biography of the country's premier and super-diplomat...
...Both the Union Research Institute's Who's Who in Communist China and the new Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, edited by Howard Boorman and published by Columbia University Press, list his birthplace as Shao-hsing, Chekiang...
...or during the Sian Incident in 1936 when Chou is credited with the saving of Chiang's life after he had been kidnapped by his own generals...
...The difficulty of pinning down even the simplest facts is apparent in regard to the question of Chou's birthplace...
...It was Chou who organized all the key systems the Communist Party has set up—from the terrorist network in Shanghai in the 1920's to the mammoth national government machinery he administers today—and made them work...
Vol. 32 • June 1968 • No. 6
